CFO Insights: What audit committees really want from CFOs
For some CFOs, preparing to appear before the audit committee may conjure memories of final exams or first job interviews. Indeed, CFOs’ quarterly presentations before the audit committee could be seen as a test of sorts.
The audit committee’s responsibilities are broad, ranging from reviewing management’s approach to enterprise risk, to understanding financial reporting disclosures, to evaluating its processes and controls and compliance matters, to assessing the performance of its external and internal auditors. Furthermore, many aspects of the committee’s work is shaped by rules and regulations issued by a combination of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the listing exchanges, and other regulators specific to the company. For CFOs, whose role includes guiding the committee through the company’s financial results and reporting on its risk management activities, it can be difficult to figure out where to begin and how to end.
In this edition of CFO Insights, we’ll synthesize what we’ve learned from engaging CFOs in our labs and forums and from interviewing audit committee chairs and members as part of our CFO Program’s CFO Transition Lab™ offering, as well as through other client interactions, to provide CFOs with general answers to that seminal question: What do audit committees really want?
This publication was released by our US firm.
